Friday, December 23, 2011

Here are several of the latest unidentified flying objects (UFOs) seen recently across the globe.

Three glowing lights were seen and recorded in the night sky above Altai Republic in southern Russia on the 11th of December, 2011 at 6:25 pm.

WATCH: Triangle formation over Russia.

This strange bright object was seen and recorded in the night skies above Netherlands this month.

WATCH: UFO over Netherlands.

This unidentified flying object was seen and filmed in the daytime skies above Zagreb, the capital and the largest city of the Republic of Croatia. The visual capture was done on the 21st of December, 2011.

WATCH: UFO sighting over Croatia.

A bright unknown object was filmed, slowly flying in the sky above Chelyabinsk in Russia. This footage was recorded on Wednesday, the 21st of December, 2011.

WATCH: Bright UFO flying over Chelyabinsk.

A rather interesting bit of UFO footage that was shot in Southampton, England back in 2008. The original film has now been stabilized and enhance for a more discernable view.

WATCH: Black triangular UFO over Southampton.

UFO seen during the launch of Russia's Soyuz Rocket to the International Space Station (ISS) at the Balauikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, on the 21st of December, 2011. The UFO can be seen at the 2 minute and 55 second mark.

WATCH: UFO during Soyuz launch.

Bright objects hovering over the skies of Ukraine. The filming was done in December. The exact location in the Ukraine is unknown.

WATCH: UFO over Ukraine.

A very bright UFO was filmed over Ecuador in the month of September, 2011. The original video was enhanced with contrasting views.

WATCH: UFO over Ecuador.

Another bright UFO traveling with what appears to be an extremely large cloud formation over Russia. This was filmed on December 23rd, 2011.

Contingency plans for the collapse of the Euro should be talked about more openly to "soften the blow" to the British public, a leading Euro sceptic has said.

Conservative John Baron, the MP for Basildon and Billericay, wrote in a comment piece for politics.co.uk that David Cameron needed to "publicly recognise" the possibility that the currency may not be rescued. "Possible remedies should be more openly discussed," he argued. "This would do the country a great service. It would help prepare the ground and perhaps soften the blow if it comes. Publicly recognising reality would be both right and popular." The prime minister has enjoyed unusual acclaim from his party's eurosceptic backbenchers after refusing to commit Britain to fiscal integration measures now being pursued by all other EU member states.

But today's article from Mr Baron represents one of the first eurosceptic moves after the Brussels summit to place further pressure on the PM. He argued that measures to bolster the eurozone's credibility, including cuts to spending and making the European Central Bank the lender of last resort, are not long-term solutions. "The only true long-term remedy is for these economies to become more competitive, to generate growth and therefore better pay their way in the world. But there is little sign of this happening," Mr Baron added. He is calling for the prime minister to initiate a renegotiation of Britain's relationship with the European Union based on free trade, competitiveness and growth rather than political union and "deadweight regulation". Mr Cameron will find it hard to reconcile the demands of eurosceptics who are now seeking the demise of the euro with his public support for the currency.

Yesterday Britain refused to participate in a move by EU countries to bolster their anti-crisis reserves, unlike four non-euro countries which contributed to the 150 billion euro IMF package. Mr Baron argued that saving the euro could make the recession worse, as it forces countries to adopt severe austerity packages instead of considering the alternative of revaluing their currency. "If the euro were to fragment, consumers would still want their German cars and their French wine, not to mention Greek holidays – which of course would be cheaper come devaluation," he wrote. "So why is it that the eurocrats are... ignoring the markets and ploughing on regardless of economic reality? "It can only be that the euro is not an end in itself, but a means to an end – that being political union. The euro is a vital step towards this objective. Some eurozone leaders have even stated as much. "In such a make-believe world, economic reality is marginalised and the eurocrats plough on, regardless of the harm that is being done." - Politics.

The Philippines government is trying to get to grips with the the human cost of massive floods that have devastated the southern island of Mindanao. Officials say more than 1,000 people are missing, that's in addition to the 1,000 already announced dead.

More than 1,000 people are missing in the aftermath of a tropical storm that wreaked havoc across the southern Philippines last weekend, the country's government said Friday, as it grappled with the mounting humanitarian crisis in the region. A total of 1,079 people remain unaccounted for, the Philippine National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council said in a statement. Earlier in the week, the disaster council said it had lost count of the number of missing as it tried to assess the scale of the destruction. The death toll from Tropical Storm Washi, which set off landslides and flash floods that swept away whole villages, has risen to 1,080, according to the council.

The United Nations said Wednesday that the storm has created "huge" humanitarian needs on the island of Mindanao, the scene of the worst devastation. It has made an appeal to raise $28 million to deal with the immediate problems in the area, with hundreds of thousands of people displaced in and around the port cities of Iligan and Cagayan de Oro. "I was shocked by scale of destruction I saw," David Carden, the head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Philippines told CNN on Thursday after visiting the region. He said it looked as if an "inland tsunami had struck the area." - CNN.

WATCH: The BBC's Kate McGeown explains why the figures have been hard to pin down.

Wildlife officials and Clearfield city officials are investigating the mysterious death of thousands of starlings in Davis County. State wildlife officials are warning residents to stay away from the dead birds.

Earlier this week, Clearfield city officials cleaned up hundreds of birds from the city park and are now looking at number of potential causes of the mass death, including poisoning. "Initially there was speculation as to what had caused these birds to die. The reality is we just don't know what caused their deaths," said Phil Douglas, Conservation Outreach Manager for the Division of Wildlife Resources. "There's a variety of things that do happen to wild animals and and many of them have adaptations for surviving these types of things, but sometimes something happens where they just can't survive."

The DWR says they've sent some of the birds to a toxicology lab to be tested. It could be several weeks before they find out the cause of the deaths. The Dunkley family believes a dead bird made their dog sick. They say they found their dog Chewy with a dead bird in its mouth. Their vet told them she couldn't tell what had caused his illness. "Vomiting all over the place and just retching real bad," said LeRoy Dunkley. "I don't know who's poisoning the birds or for what reason but if that's why this little dog got sick. He was sick, bad." Chewy is expected to make a full recovery. The DWR encourages residents to contact them if they have any issues with their pets or any other wildlife that may have been affected by the dead starlings. - FOX13.

The University of Minnesota has won a national award for its efforts to defeat legislation that would have prohibited human cloning for biomedical research (or for any other reason). On its website, the University boasts:

“On October 4th the University of Minnesota Stem Cell Institute was awarded a prize for Public Advocacy at the World Stem Cell Summit, Pasadena, California. “The prize was in recognition of the role the Institute played in defeating legislative attempts in the State of Minnesota to ban somatic cell nuclear transfer: a technique used in certain types of stem cell research. “The prize was accepted by Stem Cell Institute Director, Dr. Jonathan Slack. He said ‘This is an award for the whole University of Minnesota. The Communications Office of the Academic Health Center did great work organizing the campaign, and there was good backing from the leadership of both the University and the Mayo Clinic. The role of patient advocacy organizations and the business community in Minnesota was also critical, and we are very grateful to them.’”

The University is referring to Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life-backed legislation to prohibit the cloning of human organisms (via the cloning technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer, or SCNT), which easily passed the Minnesota Legislature this spring but was vetoed by Gov. Mark Dayton. (Also vetoed was legislation to continue an existing ban on state funding of human cloning.) The University did indeed work vigorously against the proposed human cloning ban. But it did not do so admirably, honestly, and ethically — the way one would hope an important public institution would advocate for its views. Rather, it did so very dishonestly and apparently without shame. That sounds like hyperbole or wild political rhetoric, but it’s not, as we’ve documented here repeatedly throughout the course of the debate.

For example, University researcher John Wagner claimed in a Star Tribune op-ed that legislation banning human cloning was “a full-scale assault on stem cell research” and would “criminalize lifesaving work at the University of Minnesota.” But the bill would not have affected any stem cell research — or any other current or pursued work — at the University, as the University had admitted in testimony and even to the media. And to call the University’s non-existent cloning work “lifesaving” is simply absurd, as anyone familiar with the failure to date of so-called “therapeutic” cloning knows. Never in his op-ed did Wagner explain what the bill actually did. He clearly led readers to believe it would prohibit existing embryonic stem cell research (it would not, as he elsewhere admitted). He never mentioned SCNT (cloning), the sole subject of the legislation.

In his op-ed and in a longer piece with his colleague Meri Firpo, Wagner carefully avoided using the correct scientific term for the entity from which embryonic stem cells are derived. (It’s called a human embryo — that is, a human organism at the embryonic stage of development.) The University misled regarding the nature of somatic cell nuclear transfer and cloning — at least, those few times when it admitted that SCNT was involved. And never did the University offer a serious ethical justification for human cloning or embryo killing. That, I suppose, would first require being honest about the practice whose ethical status we are evaluating.

On its website today, the University makes some of the same obviously false statements, claiming that defeat of the bill preserved “lifesaving research.” And in its announcement of the award for “public advocacy” (quoted above), the University says SCNT is “used in certain types of stem cell research,” a misleading claim at best. The University is not pursuing SCNT, and stem cells have never been successfully derived from SCNT-produced human embryos — though researchers recently derived (therapeutically useless) stem cells from abnormal cloned embryos produced using a modified SCNT process.

Jonathan Slack, the Stem Cell Institute director, said at a University event opposing the human cloning ban: “It isn’t the business of legislators to decide what researchers can do.” Arrogant. Ridiculous. Utterly thoughtless. So how did the University win its award? Persistent deception of the taxpaying, University-supporting public in order to preserve the possibility of deciding at some point in the future to create cloned members of the human species to then kill by harvesting their useful parts, a practice that seems less and less to have any potential therapeutic value whatsoever. As the University boasts of an award for its politics, no benefits of embryo-destructive cloning research are in sight. In this regard, Minnesotans can only be ashamed and embarrassed of our state’s flagship University. - NRTL.

When you can make a humanoid robot that plays soccer and dances, why limit him to below-average or even average human stature? He should definitely be a giant robot instead, because there is nothing terrifying or awkward about that, not at all. Don’t worry, a Japanese robotics company is planning just that — a 13-foot-tall iron giant.

Hajime Sakamoto, president of the humanoid-robot-building Hajime Research Institute, already has a 7-foot-tall humanoid robot, which you can see kicking a soccer ball in the awesomely soundtracked video below. This one will be nearly twice as tall, looming four meters above the ground. It will even have a built-in cockpit, according to the robotics site Plastic Pals.

Hajime Research explains that this will be a real-life version of a Mobile Suit, a robot character in the anime series Gundam, featuring what basically look like Autobots. If all goes well, Hajime Research wants to build a 26-foot model and eventually a 59-foot version. - POPSCI.

A large metallic space ball fell out of the sky on a remote grassland in Namibia, prompting authorities to contact NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).

The hollow ball, which has a circumference of 43 inches, was found near a village in the north of Namibia some 480 miles from the capital Windhoek, according to police forensics director Paul Ludik. Locals had heard several small explosions a few days beforehand, he said. With a diameter of 14 inches, the ball has a rough surface and appears to consist of "two halves welded together". It was made of a "metal alloy known to man" and weighed 13 pounds, said Ludik. It was found 59ft from its landing spot, a hole one foot deep and 12ft wide.

Several such balls have reportedly dropped in southern Africa, Australia and Latin America in the past twenty years. The sphere was discovered mid-November, but authorities first did tests before announcing the find. Police deputy inspector general Vilho Hifindaka concluded the sphere did not pose any danger. "It is not an explosive device, but rather hollow, but we had to investigate all this first," he said. - Telegraph.